In the land of purity (of thought)

The time, my friends, has come to speak in plain French...

'The French are the most abstract and religious people in the world; the fanaticism with them goes hand in hand with lack of respect for persons..the French turn everything into an idol, and then woe to him who does not bow the knee to the idol of the day. Frenchmen fight like heroes for freedom and without a thought drag you to jail if you don't agree with their opinions...everywhere dualism, abstraction, abstract duty, enforced virtues and official and rhetorical morality without any relation to life.'

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The thing with reading Berlin is that it is easy to get swayed by the breathless prose so that your mind soon relaxes its guard. But, having said that, there isn't half a lot of convoluted nonsense churned out by academics and theorists...

'This is not just its situation ‘in principle’ (the one it occupies in the hierarchy of instances in relation to the determinant instance: in society, the economy) nor just its situation ‘in fact’(whether, in the phase under consideration, it is dominant or subordinate) but the relation of this situation in fact to this situation in principle, that is, the very relation which makes of this situation in fact a ‘variation’ of the — ‘invariant’ — structure, in dominance, of the totality.

(Althusser, cited by Scruton).

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The attempt to appear clever with fancy language or sophisticated mathematics is one of the oldest tricks in town. Religious folks had their own version of what constituted the esoteric and, surprise, surprise, it turned out that only they had privileged access to 'the real', the inner sanctuary of truth, whilst the rest of the poor sods had to make do with rituals, superstitions, and a hotch-potch of inherited sayings, opinions and proverbs. 

The display of intelligence. Really is awfully boring...

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Back in the land of the Pure, politicians left right and centre are being banned from participating in the upcoming elections because they are not deemed to be truthful and of good moral character. You have to laugh. This would make great material for a comic novel. Some of the questions asked of candidates:

What do you think of honeymoon? If your wife, child and a scholar of Islam are drowning, whom would you save? Please recite the third kalima.